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Experience Of Storerooms and Significance by Stephen Cox Little things in
life do add up when one is faced with a life-altering event . . . such as
cancer.
Early in the morning of July 9 I entered the hospital to
undergo an operation for the kind of condition that newspapers call "a
life-threatening illness." It was kidney cancer, and the operation consisted of
the removal of part of my kidney and a rib that had the misfortune to be standing
in the way. The operation appears to have been successful. I'm still feeling the
aftereffects, and will for some time, but I believe that the operation saved my
life.
| | Stephen
Cox is a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego
and the author of "The Titanic Story." |
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It"s ordinary to talk about "what you learned" from such experiences, and I"m
going to do some of that. Another purpose of this reflection, however, is to talk
about a problem that I encountered at the hospital and have been thinking about
ever since.
But first, What I Learned.
I learned that, for me, there are many worse experiences than discovering that
one has a potentially fatal disease. Any number of failed romances, anxiously
anticipated tests, and transitory professional disappointments have troubled me
more than knowing that I had cancer. I can"t say whether this demonstrates how
wise I am, or how stupid. I assume that I wouldn"t have felt quite the same way
if I"d received a diagnosis of an irremediably terminal condition. But I can"t
claim much sympathy for my preoperative hardship and distress. On the assumption
that I might not survive the operation, I cleaned up some stuff that I wouldn"t
want my executor to be plagued with, and I completed a couple of literary
projects that I would be disappointed to leave in an unpublishable condition.
Then, on the more likely assumption that I would survive, I stocked my
refrigerator with a lot of easy-prep food, and I was ready to go to the
hospital.
Contrary to my expectation, almost everyone I met there was intelligent,
efficient, kind, and thoughtful. My physician and his team conducted a long and
difficult operation with confidence before the fact and modesty after it. My
insurance paid for everything except the first $250.
Needless to say, I was happy about all that. But to me the most impressive
aspect was my friends. They are a very diverse lot. What had always interested
me, in thinking about them as a group, was their difference from one another.
What I noticed now was their similarity. They all turned out to be aggressive,
determined, take-charge personalities. They wanted the best for me, and they made
sure that I got it, whether that meant taking care of me themselves or making
sure that somebody else was doing it, and doing it right. After my operation,
they fed me, clothed me, cooked for me, cleaned for me, anointed my wounds, and
managed my moods. They entertained me, advised me, listened to me, and even left
me alone when I needed to be alone.
Just before I went to the hospital, I asked three friends (the legally
stipulated number) to exercise my "power of attorney for health care," which
means being willing to decide, if necessary, the point at which my life would not
be worth continuing. Two of these people are straight and one is gay. Two are
libertarians and one is a modern liberal. One is an atheist, one is a devout
Christian, and one is waiting for all the evidence to come in. But I never had to
think about discussing "my wishes" with any of them. I knew without asking that
on questions of life and death we would all make the same decisions.
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| The weeks I spent killing
cancer were far from the unhappiest weeks of my life. Some, indeed, were among
the happiest. |
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Because of my friends I can make the ridiculous, but perfectly true, statement
that the weeks I spent killing cancer were far from the unhappiest weeks of my
life. Some, indeed, were among the happiest.
As I indicated, however, there is one part of my experience that I"ve had
trouble coming to terms with. It has nothing to do with problems of religion or
politics or ethics or my ideas about the health-care system. My ideas about those
topics didn"t change in the least, although some of the tonalities deepened in
ways that I don"t think I can evoke very clearly. What I can discuss is the place
I was put in just before I went into the operating room.
Like most other non-medical personnel, I"m always surprised by the way that
the insides of a hospital look. The rooms always look much nicer or uglier, much
more efficient or less efficient than I would have expected. The pre-op room
presented more than the usual surprise. It looked like a storeroom. There were
two or three hospital beds scattered about, but the other furnishings consisted
of some tall metal cabinets with the doors ajar and some little metal chairs and
tables with a lot of amorphous stuff sitting around on them. In short, the place
was utterly lacking in the dignity to be expected of the Last Place I Might Ever
See on Earth.
They wheeled me in there, and I lay on my bed while a nurse asked me for the
40th time whether I was allergic to latex. Then a young anesthesiologist leaned
over me and formally reviewed the dangers of the operation. "There is a small
chance that your teeth may be broken or your mouth otherwise injured by tubes
injected into your oral cavity . . ." He concluded by mentioning the danger of
cardiac arrest. "In other words," I said, "you mean I may die." "Yes, that"s what
I mean." "I understand," I said. We were both laughing, although the chance that
I might die on the table undoubtedly loomed a lot larger in my mind than it did
in his. It was, in truth, very small.
Those conversations didn"t bother me. What bothered me was the wait that
followed. It took about 20 minutes for the anesthetic he administered to exit the
IV tube and work its way into my brain. During its journey, I was left alone. My
primary concern, at that august moment, was the possibility that, somehow, while
I was waiting to pass out, I might develop a raging need to piss. I could picture
myself rising from my bed, festooned with IVs, to demand that the operating team
go cool their heels until I returned from the restroom. I knew it was one more
humorous proof that embarrassment is generally more frightful than death, but the
thought failed to cheer me.
My secondary concern was a trifle less silly. I was not, after all, entirely
alone. There was one other person in the room, and she was becoming a bother. She
was a busy little woman, and she was apparently a nurse, but she was not there to
attend to me. She was wandering back and forth from one storage cabinet to
another, counting things, arranging things, and chattering to herself, or perhaps
to me, about the difficulty of keeping all these things in order. The mundane
quality of her conversation cannot easily be exaggerated. "Oh my," she kept
saying, in her little sing-song voice, "oh my. I just don"t know. I thought they
were all right here, but now I don"t know where they are. I don"t know where they
went. I need to count them all again. One, two, three . . . no, no . . . One,
two, three, four . . . I need to count them all again now . . ." Despite her
struggles, she seemed quite complacent.
| I still do not want to
die in a storeroom, no matter how zen that prospect might seem to some more
purely spiritual being. |
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This will be my ultimate experience of life, I thought — not the wise
words of loving friends, not even the ghastly testimony of my own fears, but a
stranger"s trivial monologue about pure trivia. I couldn"t even say that I was
saddened or insulted. No, no: I would go to my death in a state of mild
irritation, nothing more. I was thinking in this way when a posse of young men
took hold of my bed and pushed it through the big double doors of whatever lay
beyond. It was then that I lost consciousness.
I often recur to that episode, and when I do, I find that it"s associated in
my mind with many things. It brings to remembrance the scenes from my childhood
in which I first encountered death. I remember a little frame house with tarpaper
brick on the outside and overheated rooms on the inside; a strangely transformed
neighbor sprawled on a hospital bed that overshadowed the cheap, familiar
furnishings; the patient lying silent while the television continued its intrepid
round of sitcoms and the assembled relatives shouted to one another over the
blasts of laughter, diligently discussing the latest baseball news. Was it all a
brave attempt to reassure the dying man with a pretense of normalcy? Or was it
merely a crass announcement of the insignificance of human life? "Oh my, oh my. I
just don"t know."
I can"t entertain those memories for very long, however, before I recall, by
contrast, the many scenes of my own life that have been distorted and embittered
by my demand that every moment be charged with significance. If the reality was
insignificant, I wanted at least the symbol. If you don"t really love me, at
least you can act like it. I needed the first two-thirds of my life to learn that
I should stop ruining the ordinary and the pleasant with my demands for the
extraordinary and the dramatic. But now, thanks to the little nurse in the
hospital and her insupportable chatter, I"ve discovered that I can only be
satisfied with the end of my life if something of intense symbolic significance
is arranged to happen at that end. Apparently, I"d be happy to exchange the
ordinary nurse for a demon from hell, dispatched with special orders to summon me
to the wrong side of that painting in the Sistine Chapel.
That seems absurd enough. Yet what is either life or death without the desire
for significance and intensity? And what, after all, is my chattering little
nurse, if not a symbol — for me, a pretty intense symbol — of the
problem of life"s significance, and of how we confront that problem? Symbolism is
hard to get away from, once you start to wonder about it. I could not get away
from that woman in the pre-op room, and I cannot get away from her now. What
emphasis I give to her — that"s another question.
After all my meditations on the issue, I still do not want to die in a
storeroom, no matter how zen that prospect might seem to some more purely
spiritual being. And yet, I do not want to be the kind of person who dies with a
disappointed craving to die in some other, more intensity-fraught location, all
for the sake of its symbolic significance.
A great poet (in a poem I have never really liked) spoke of "the one life,
within us and abroad." I think I"m beginning to understand what he meant. He
meant, among other things, that the world of poetry, symbolism, dramatic
intensity is not separate from the world that seems to lack those things.
A world without the symbol-making, symbol-demanding power, a world in which
poets never spoke and readers never liked or disliked, would not be a world worth
thinking about. It would be a paltry, insignificant world. Yet, at least in sober
moments, I thank God that there are people who spend their time counting medical
supplies, and chattering about it too; because they are as much a part of this
amazing world as I am, and they contribute to its amazing life. Another great
poet, writing of death, said that "ripeness is all." I may be as far away as ever
from understanding exactly what he meant, but I know that every extraordinary
statement consists, in the end, of common words.
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